Ōkunoshima
— the island that returned to the rabbits.
Not only on a wall.
“A four-kilometre island in the Seto Inland Sea, reached by a fifteen-minute ferry from Tadanoumi. Once a closed military site, the place Japan made mustard gas between 1929 and 1945, and now a quiet coastal park where several hundred feral rabbits hold the ground. A small poison gas museum near the old munitions ruins. A single hotel with a hot spring on the south shore.
Ōkunoshima, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Ōkunoshima is a small island in the Seto Inland Sea, about four kilometres in circumference, in Takehara City, Hiroshima Prefecture. Ferries from Tadanoumi Port reach the island in roughly fifteen minutes. The island sits within Setonaikai National Park, the oldest national park in Japan, established in 1934. From 1929 until 1945 the Imperial Japanese Army operated a chemical-weapons factory here, producing mustard and lewisite agents under conditions kept off official maps. The island has no permanent residents today beyond a single hotel and the staff who run it.
The animals carry the island now. Estimates published by Takehara City put the feral rabbit population between five hundred and a thousand, descended either from animals released after the chemical plant closed in 1945 or from school rabbits brought over in the 1970s. They live without natural predators and meet the ferry. Visitors are asked not to bring outside greens, not to pick the rabbits up, and not to feed them in the sun. The official Ōkunoshima rules ask quiet of the people the island has stopped expecting.
The island opens at the ferry, a fifteen-minute crossing from Tadanoumi Port, itself a short walk from JR Tadanoumi Station on the Kure Line. The Poison Gas Museum sits a few minutes from the dock and documents the factory's operation between 1929 and 1945 and the long medical follow-up of its workers. Walking the ring road takes about ninety minutes. The single accommodation, Kyukamura Ōkunoshima, has a hot-spring bath open to day visitors. Most travellers come for a half-day and leave before the last ferry.